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Crap ^^'
Guess I'll have to pick them up when I hear people using keigo then.

To be honest, though, I wouldn't think Japanese people would expect a foreigner to have a good understanding of son'keigo (尊敬語) and ken'jougo (謙譲語) -- or to even know what they are.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Honey_and_Cleaver

My japanese teacher doesnt get made at me for being totally rude at my japanese. She says it good to absorb japanese culture from animes, it shows tham im well familiar with japanese sounds. When it comes to pronouncing, i have good ear in my class, but not good memory.

Yeah adding masu and desu makes it less rude. Instead of "nei yo", you say "dewa arimasen desuyo"
Actually i find polite japanese sucks, too long and i like how rude japanese tend to sound.

Sometimes i spill out "Attarimai ja nei ka yo!" or "en da?". My teacher just laughs. I think later, i would get screwed for this.

You don't speak a language based on whatever words you think sounds cool.

I can't speak with certainty, but if you really do want to learn the language on its own rights (not simply because you love anime) then break this habit or you WILL get burned later on. I'm actually very surprised your teacher would let you get away with speaking like a punk kid.

You guys' avatars confuse me.To be honest, though, I wouldn't think Japanese people would expect a foreigner to have a good understanding of son'keigo (尊敬語) and ken'jougo (謙譲語) -- or to even know what they are.

Well... here at university we've to be able to use keigo and not only when giving a presentation ^^'

Most people here study Japanese in order to work in Japan or at least for a Japanese company here and therefore they say it's important that we know about it. It's my first year of Japanese. The next year they'll focus on when to use what kind of speech etc.

For now they introduced just a few irregular verbs and the grammatical rules to form humble and honorific forms. We get lots of exercises about it... Oral as well as written. Lately I've been busy with 授受動詞 (jujudoushi) in humble and honorific forms in sentences where you put a verb in the 〜て形＋Giving/Receiving verbs i.e.

There's a freeware word processor online called JWPCe that comes integrated with EDICT, which is a pretty helpful English-Japanese & Japanese-English tool. Anyways, if you don't want to download the program, you can check Jim Breen's WWWJDIC, which has edict and glossdic, as well as many other dictionaries (most of which I still haven't found the use for, but I'm sure I will someday).

__________________

Place them in a box until a quieter time | Lights down, you up and die.

For those on other OSes, there are similar edict-integrating dictionaries.
I use gjiten on Linux and Mayjay on OS X.

And if I'm on the web, I either use Jim Breen's server or, more commonly these days, I visit http://jisho.org/ which is also my #1 spot for looking up kanji by radical (it has a great interface, give it a try!)

I'm extra glad I found jisho.org, because I only came across it while researching how to build something very similar. Saved me a lot of work!

You don't speak a language based on whatever words you think sounds cool.

I can't speak with certainty, but if you really do want to learn the language on its own rights (not simply because you love anime) then break this habit or you WILL get burned later on. I'm actually very surprised your teacher would let you get away with speaking like a punk kid.

I dont find it sucks because it sounds cool, it sucks because it damn hard to remember. Polite japanese is the most difficult to learn especially when speaking to a boss. Theres even a different japanese when writing. I just find the plain japanese much fun to use and sounds nicer. Anyway wanting to know the words that sounds cool is developes an interest in japanese, i think thats what my japanese teacher thinks. All of the other students study japanese because of work.

Actually, polite speech is much easier, since all the verbs conjugate the same with the 'masu' ending (which may be another reason why it's usually taught first). It is also less prone to random idiosyncracies, so it's easier to understand people when they speak this way.

Actually, polite speech is much easier, since all the verbs conjugate the same with the 'masu' ending (which may be another reason why it's usually taught first). It is also less prone to random idiosyncracies, so it's easier to understand people when they speak this way.

In addition to that, it's much easier to manipulate -masu form into other forms such as -te form. Also, lot's of grammar structures just use the verb stem (masu form but without the -masu). Which is why it's almost always taught first. However, being polite isn't only just about using masu form (teineigo). Sonkeigo and kenjougo is where it gets slightly tricky.

Teineigo (-masu) is just to be polite overall, whereas sonkeigo is where you are describing the actions of people superior than you and kenjougo is where you are actually speaking to someone higher than you (eg, your company's CEO) and you are describing the action of you and the people within your "group." When using these forms of speech, some verbs change into something completely different

By the way, about that JWPce. Download it. Now. It is VERY useful. If it were to keep a log of how many times i've used its dictionary, it would at least be in the 5 digit figure. Really useful for people learning japanese, saves the fuss of going to an online dictionary and searching for a word (don't even mention a real dictionary)

My preferred dictionary: http://dict.regex.info/cgi-bin/j-e/sjis/dict (has mirrors, occasionally you may have to use them). Also includes kanji look-up through various means, but not through visual recognition (although the visual ones seem to be pretty flawed. Nice idea, though). You might need to tweak a special option to get it out output the reading in hiragana instead of romaji on some mirrors, although that might only matter to you if you're like me and can't stand romaji in place of hiragana/katakana. Probably a nice option for the beginners, though.

Ouch >_<
My bad... after the first part of the word my brain probably entered a side track to continue processing that word

But for once that sidetrack was more or less right.
It's still gross when you imagine what it could look like and I'm very good at imagining stuff! Sometimes what I imagine scares the shit out of me. Not because it's gross, but because I was able to imagine such things.